Catholic Church

A fifth Methodist body has joined an ongoing effort to foster cooperation among black and white Methodists. The little-known Union American Methodist Episcopal Church joined the Commission on Pan-Methodist Cooperation and Union during the commission’s November 19-21 meeting in Dallas, the United Methodist News Service reported.

The president of Bob Jones University, a conservative Christian school in South Carolina, has written President GeorgeW.Bush to say his reelection shows that God has given the nation “a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.” BobJonesIII read his November 3 letter to students at a chapel service on the Greenville campus, and it was posted on the school’

The Vatican and the United States were close allies during the 1980s phase of the cold war. Republican President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II seemed to campaign shoulder to shoulder to oppose Soviet communism, especially in the pontiff’s homeland of Poland, and to combat abortion.

New guidelines for starting Southern Baptist churches ask members of new congregations to affirm biblical inerrancy and male-only deacons. The guidelines, adopted October 6 by trustees of the North American Mission Board, do not apply to existing Southern Baptist congregations but can be applied to the 1,500 new churches planted by NAMB each year.

Anyone who teaches at a secular university knows that today’s students are far more likely to know the name of a Hindu god or to practice some form of Buddhist meditation than to recognize the name of the mother of Jesus or to pray in an explicitly Christian way.

El Salvador’s Catholic Church is calling for a renewed investigation of the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero following a ruling in which a Salvadoran man now living in California was found liable for the crime.

Mark Twain once said, “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” If this is true, then Jimmy Breslin is in harm’s way. He unleashes his sometimes irrational anger at the Roman Catholic Church—its bishops, its priests and even its would-be saints.

Russian Orthodox church leaders have welcomed Pope John Paul II’s decision to return a precious icon to Russia, a representation of Mary and Child that was handed over in Moscow in late August by a Catholic delegation.